This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Internet Movie Database. The single greatest free movie resource in the history of the world has, incredibly, been alive and kicking since October 17, 1990 and to celebrate, the site has been interviewing some of the biggest stars around about film culture, their favorite movies and more. People such as Kevin Spacey, Josh Brolin, Oliver Stone, and Susan Sarandon all sat down in celebration of this momentous occasion and on the actual anniversary, the IMDB orchestrated a funny chat with Adam McCay and Will Ferrell, two of the guys behind Funny or Die as well as films like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and The Other Guys. We’ve got the video and a little ode to the IMDB after the break. Read More »

Please Recommend /Film on Facebook

Someone has uploaded the above graph to Reddit, showing the progressively worse and worse tomato-meter ratings of filmmaker M Night Shyamalan‘s movies on Rotten Tomatoes. The graph hypotheses that if things continue on path, Night will direct a movie that gets the first ever negative movie score in Rotten Tomatoes history. Of course, the graph predicts this will happen sometime in 2012 or 2013 — and we all know the end of the world could save us all from the impending worst movie ever made.

It is now official, M Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender has beaten the Brendan Fraser animal family comedy Furry Vengeance to become the worst reviewed film of the year. This according to Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles reviews from movie critics from around the world. Airbender has a 6% rating with 80 reviews counted thus far. That means that only five of the critics files a positive review. If you’re wondering which movie critics liked the movie, hit the jump.

When the Rotten Tomatoes twitter account announced that Toy Story 3 still had a 100% fresh rating with over 130 reviews and counting, I got excited. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and it deserves all the praise it has and will recieve. The reason I got excited is that it had the chance to become the best reviewed movie in the history of cinema (this according to Rotten Tomatoes of course, albeit still a milestone achievement).

I’m not going to debate the merits of the achievement — best reviewed film of all time doesn’t mean best movie of all time. Also, as we know Rotten Tomatoes is not based on a scale of enjoyment, just thumbs up or down. Meaning, the best reviewed film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes means the largest percentage of possitive reviews.

With 147 100% positive reviews, Toy Story 2 has held the coveted top slot for eleven years and counting. The film to come closest was the 2008 documentary Man On Wire — 100% fresh with 142 reviews, six short of the #1 slot. And how fitting would it have been to have the Pixar’s latest film, the third film in the trilogy, knock Toy Story 2 from the top of the mountain.

What happened? You guessed it. Armond White — the notorious contrarian movie reviewer for the alt-weekly New York Press. You might recall that White was the first critic to give Pixar’s last film Up a negative review. Whats worse, he gave Jonah Hex a positive review, a film which has been panned by critics and moviegoers (12% on Rotten Tomatoes with almost 90 reviews).

Years ago, I remember using a little site called Flixter that let users rate movies, and thinking to myself that it would likely never take off. I mean, Internet Movie Database (IMDb) had a much larger sample of users to draw from, and it didn’t seem like Flixter would ever be able to catch up. Enter Facebook, and their open app api. It seemed like overnight every one of my facebook friends had their favorite movies listed and rated using the Flixter app. Overnight Flixter became a competitor in the online movie space. It also helps that they jumped on the iPhone app bandwagon very eary on and quickly became the go-to app for movie showtimes, ratings, and ticket purchasing.

So when I was sent a link from Mashable announcing that Flixter was going to acquire Rotten Tomatoes from the Fox-owned IGN Entertainment, I was surprised but not shocked. IGN will get minority equity stake in Flixster, and both sites will continue to operate as separate properties, although it is expected that we’ll start seeing data more integrated across the two.

Today I decided to compile the top 25 films of the decade, as voted by the users of the Internet Movie Database. While it is very easy to discount any of these lists (or any best of list in general), and while it might be easy for many of you to just write off the user ratings on IMDb as fanboy voting, it’s definitely the largest sampling of movie-going opinion that exists today.

# American Film Title (year) IMDb rating # of Votes # on Top 250 of all Time List

1. The Dark Knight (2008) 8.8 410,450 9 2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 8.8 329,852 11 3. City of God (2002) 8.7 148,073 16 4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) 8.7 355,929 20 5. Avatar (2009) 8.6 69,101 24

Metacritic has released their list of the best and worst reviewed films of the decade. Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth sits in the #1 spot. I’ve included the top 10 after the jump, as well as a list I’ve compiled of the top 20 best reviewed films of the decade from Rotten Tomatoes. Man On Wire ranks in at #1, the only film with over 100 reviews to have 100% fresh rating.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon hasn’t even hit theaters yet, and as far as I can tell, hasn’t had many advance screenings, yet the sequel has already been voted on by over 1,700 users on the Internet Movie Database. While over 46% of users have given the film a 10 out of 10, more than 44% of users have given the movie a 1 out of 10. What’s the rating? 4.5. Of course it seems more like a turf war battle of the sexes than a real sample of user opinions.

The funniest thing about the rankings is the demographics behind the votes The average Male user rating is a 3.3, while the average female user rating is an 8.0. And while females under 18 rate the film a 8.7, the most popular demo is the “Twilight Mom”, females aged 30-44, which have given the film an average rating of a 9.9. Wow… Full graphs after the jump.

The Internet Movie Database have announced The Top Rated Films of the New Millennium, looking at the 15 films made since 2000 that IMDb users have rated as the best of the new millennium. Usually people are quick to write off the IMDb user ratings as fanboy controlled, but I was surprised to four foreign and three animated films on the list, films from Darren Aronofsky and Michel Gondry, in addition to the expected trilogy and comic book heros. Check out the full list after the jump.

Discuss: Forget the order of titles, as we could argue about that for a year… Which films shouldn’t have made it, and which films should be on the list, but aren’t?